24: Rob Friesel: The PhantomJS Cookbook

PhantomJS Cookbook

Today I’m inviting you to join me in the test automation kitchen as Rob Friesel, author of the PhantomJS CookBook gets ready to serve up some tasty PhantomJS automation awesomeness. We’ll be sampling some of his popular recipes and discovering how to succeed with PhantomJs.

About Rob Friesel

Rob is the author of the PhatomJS Cookbook published by Packt Publishing.

Rob is also a UI engineer at Dealer.com that focuses on thoughtful, scalable front-end design for large web applications and a science fiction writer who started off just doing a few editor jobs.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Don’t look at your test as just a checkbox on your developer to-do list.
• There is business value in your tests.
• PhantomJS is a headless build of WebKit that allows you to do a bunch of web stuff.
• The PhantomJS Cookbook is a go-to resource that will help you get up to speed quickly on how to get started with PhantomJS.
• It is a balancing act between your unit test and your end-to-end test.
• There are many things that only a UI end-to-end automation test can find.
• A good target is 80% unit test code coverage.
• PhantomJS in itself is not a test framework, but it’s a really good cannery in a coal mine to give you some confidence; if your tests are passing, you can have a high degree of confidence that your code is ok.
• Don’t develop false confidence in your PhantomJs tests. It’s a great place to start, but not a cure-all.
• Don’t test just for testing’s sake. Be thoughtful about the unit tests you are writing.

Resources

• Buy the –>PhantomJS CookBook<– now!
• Maintainable JavaScript – by Nicholas C. Zakas
• If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript – by Angus Croll
• Testable JavaScript – by Mark Ethan Trostler
• Javascript Testing Recipes

Tools

• IntelliJ IDEA & WebStorm
• Karma – javascript test runner
• CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript for the PhantomJS WebKit headless browser and SlimerJS (Gecko).
• Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose.
• istanbul: A Javascript code coverage tool written in JS

Connect with Rob

• Twitter: @founddrama
• Rob’s Blog: blog.founddrama.net

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